The number of goods and services that are available via online commerce (i.e., e-commerce) is ever increasing. For example, consumers may interact with a wide variety of web sites over the Internet to purchase books, software, music, content subscriptions (e.g., streaming audio and video), and so forth. To increase traffic to web sites which provide these goods and services, the web sites may distribute offers for access to the goods and services, such as “10% off all purchases”, “free shipping”, and so on. In another instance, “special” offers may be provided to consumers for continued loyalty, such as by providing a free gift after the purchase of a predetermined number of goods or services.
To protect these offers from attack and unauthorized distribution, tokens may be used to represent these offers for communication to the respective web sites. Thus, the tokens may be used to represent monetary values in online commerce systems. Tokens may take a variety of forms, such as by a string of characters that is entered by a user to represent the monetary value. However, like other forms of online communication, tokens may be attacked by malicious parties to gain unauthorized access to the offer.
Therefore, there is a continuing need for methods, systems, and apparatus for generation, distribution and verification of tokens such that the tokens are protected from malicious parties.